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Historicism and the a priori of History1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 June 2010

Lionel Rubinoff
Lionel Rubinoff
Affiliation:
York University
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Extract

One of the central problems in philosophy since Kant has been that of the possibility of a science of human culture. Dilthey, Croce and Collingwood devoted their energies to this task, in an atmosphere marked by an intense hostility between positivists, who represented the tradition of naturalism and historicists, who represented the tradition of humanism. The positivists, led by Comte, Buckle, Mill and Taine, argued for a science of man modelled on the prevailing methods of the natural sciences. Typical of this approach was the attempt by the English historian T. H. Buckle:

to accomplish for the history of man something equivalent, or at all events analogous, to what has been effected by other inquiries for the different branches of the natural sciences.

Type
Critical Notice
Information
Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review / Revue canadienne de philosophie , Volume 3 , Issue 1 , June 1964 , pp. 81 - 88
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 1964

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References

2 Buckle, T. H., History of Civilization in England, London, 1902, Vol. I, pp. 6, 13Google Scholar.

3 Thus Droysen, writing to Max Dunckler in 1852: “Woe to us if the polytechnical misery which since 1789 has fouled and dried up France, spreads still more the Babylonian mixture of dissoluteness and calculation.” (J. G. Droysen Briefwechsel, ed. by Rudolf Hubner, 1929, II, 120).

Cf. Croce: “if the formulas of … positivism had been followed to the letter all light of thought would have been extinguished.” (History, its Theory and Practice, 1960, p. 309).

Cf. Ortega: “we must shake ourselves free, radically free, from the physical, the natural approach to the human element … The prodigious achievement of natural science in the direction of the knowledge of things contrasts brutally with the collapse of this same science when faced with the strictly human element … the conviction of this incompetence is today a fact of the first magnitude on the European horizon.” (“History as a System” in Philosophy and History, pp. 293–295).

Cf. Collingwood: “we must first achieve a genuinely scientific and therefore autonomous method in historical study before we can grasp the fact that human activity is free (The Idea of History, 1946, pp. 319–20) … This is why historical knowledge is no luxury, or mere amusement of a mind at leisure from more pressing occupations, but a prime duty, whose discharge is essential to the maintenance, not only of any particular form or type of reason, but of reason itself.” (Ibid., 277–8).